


This Isn't a Story About Shirts

by katwithallergies



Series: Not About Shirts [1]
Category: MythBusters RPF
Genre: Angst, Disability, Disabled Character, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Permanent Injury, Physical Disability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 05:34:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1767361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katwithallergies/pseuds/katwithallergies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This isn’t a story about tragedy.<br/>This isn’t a story about miracles. Or medical science.<br/>This isn’t a story about fear.<br/>This isn’t a story about anger.<br/>This isn’t a story about shirts."</p><p>An accident on the show leaves Adam a C2 quadriplegic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Isn't a Story About Shirts

_This isn’t a story about tragedy._   
_This isn’t a story about miracles. Or medical science._   
_This isn’t a story about fear._   
_This isn’t a story about anger._   
_This isn’t a story about –_

The cursor blinked steadily, waiting for Adam to finish the sentence. He sighed. Or he would have sighed just then if he could have. Because sighing is one of the 6.1 million little things you can’t do as a vented quadriplegic that you would never think about.

He waited for an exhale from the vent to let the air rush past his vocal cords and said, “This isn’t a story about how I can’t sigh anymore.” The voice recognition software typed it up on the screen.

Writing the whole book wasn’t as difficult as thinking of a title was turning out to be. A title needed to be able to sum up the whole story. It needed to be concise but powerful. He’d watched the sun-dappled reflections from the trees outside move three feet across the floor, and so far he only had a list of things his story wasn’t about.

“R2,” Adam called, deciding to put off worrying about the title. A mechanical whirring and friendly, inquisitive “Beep boop?” announced the robot’s arrival. Adam leaned his head against the halo of control buttons to turn his chair until he could see the little blue and white bot. “Go find Jamie and ask him to email me his response to that question I sent him.” With a consenting “Boop Boop” R2 retreated.

Adam watched the tracked robot whir away, round the corner and disappear. R2 had been a one-year-home-from-rehab anniversary gift from Grant and Adam was pretty sure he had sentience technology that would make foreign governments drool. Adam could, of course, have gone to find Jamie himself. Their house was equally accessible to ambulatory humans, tracked robots, and power chairs. He could also have used the house’s comm system or his cell phone, for that matter. But given the myriad of options, Adam would always choose the novelty of asking a robot to do his bidding. Because that’s just how he rolls.

R2 returned, followed by the ping of a new email arriving Adam’s inbox:

 **From** : jhyneman@gmail.com

 **Re:** Question for the book

What was it like for you when we first came home?: _I used to have a system for my shirts. Before you moved in and practically demolished the house. When I put away the laundry I would button them all the way up to the collar, and every night after wearing a shirt I would hang it back up. Shirts I had worn once went back in the closet with one button undone; shirts worn twice: two buttons. Three buttons undone meant it was time for laundry. I used to have a system._

Adam read it again. The shadows moved across the floor and he was getting nowhere. If that qualified as an answer to his question, he couldn’t see how. He went back to the word processor window.

  
_Untitled, Chapter 5_

“Sometimes it feels like this injury happened more to Jamie than it did to me,” Adam spoke to the word processor. He let his eyes drift to the window and the tree beyond, and his mind wandered. _As much as this whole thing has been unfair to me, it’s been even worse on Jamie. I know we said “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health” and all that, but really no one says that expecting that there’s a broken neck lurking in their future. That they’re committing to care for someone who for whom shrugging their shoulders will be a triumph. Certainly my first neither of my first two marriages had that level of commitment._

_I wasn’t really there for the months in the hospital waiting, just waiting to see if I would wake up or when, and what the final extent of the injury would be. I’m not sure how present I was after I did wake up, but since I don’t remember it now, it doesn’t really have much of an effect on me._

_I can’t even remember the myth we were working on at the time. Jamie has to live with the memory of the safety system he helped to design failing._  
 _My memory doesn’t really seem to get its legs (irony noted) until a year after the accident, so my perception of my injury is mostly based on life after that. Most of the hard stuff was up to Jamie to deal with, and mostly alone. I wish I knew more about how he was feeling—_ “Stop,” Adam interrupted himself. “Delete the last sentence.” The computer erased the sentence. “I wish…” he struggled. _\--that I knew what he was thinking. Jamie is like a ninja of emotional avoidance. His brain has had decades of experience perfecting its technique. I try to make it easier by asking him specific questions, but usually I get answers that just make me more confused._

_His mind works in tangents and abstractions; his train of thought veers off wildly at right angles whenever it comes too near a sensitive subject._

_The days around my arrival back home are still very patchy in my memory. It is around that time, though, that I begin to have some of my first real, solid memories. I remember complete awe at all the changes and improvements that had been made to our house. I remember crushing depression and frustration at all the things I **couldn’t** do from my chair. I remember peaceful mornings with Jamie, just the two of us, and the smell of coffee._

_Jamie, apparently, is reminded of his shirts._

  
***

  
_(September 2011, Day 1 home)_

Jamie stands at the door of his closet, white shirt dangling from his hand, frozen. He stares at the neat rows of hanging clothes; shirts hanging together, left shoulders oriented out.

( _Tits to the left_ echoes unbidden in his memory, a remnant from his days backstage in theater.)

Adam never hangs up anything.

Jamie’s gotten used to it, over the past five years, the way he tosses his clothes on the ground and pushes hangers around. If he hangs anything he does it randomly, disarraying Jamie’s careful organization.

Or at least, he used to.

Adam’s destructive influences are the signs of his habitation, the same way that Jamie naturally returns any space that he occupies to order. Jamie has grudgingly accepted the mess, so it’s the neatness that stops him. He’s been spending more and more nights at home in anticipation of Adam’s discharge and without Adam to balance him he’s gradually put things back in place, erased the evidence that Adam lives there at all.

_(Fleetingly the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang passes through the edge of Jamie’s mind. The balance of construction and destruction. Adam is curiosity and Jamie is caution.)_

Adam is home now, but unable to act on objects in the house anymore. Jamie thinks, _It’s just not right_. And he means the closet, and everything else, too.

  
***

  
_September, 2017_

Adam woke up slow, like he always had, enjoying the luxurious last few minutes of sleep. It always seemed that the best sleep of the night was the bit just before finally waking up.

He glanced around their bedroom at the fuzzy outlines of furniture and his chair, plugged into the wall and charging. Faintly he could hear Jamie using the grinder in his workshop and smell fresh coffee floating from the kitchen. Jamie was still an early riser despite waking up every couple hours through the night to cath Adam and triple check his vent settings.

“Jeeves, glasses please,” Adam said and the house computer brought his glasses to his face on a robotic arm. “Thanks,” he said.

When they first got Jeeves up and running he talked a lot more, always “ _Right away, sir_ ” and “ _As you wish, sir_ ,” but it creeped Adam out, so now he didn’t talk unless he needed to. “You can tell Jamie I’m awake,” he told the computer.

The computer was one of Grant’s ideas, and several of the robotic arms and the apparatus that it operated were Adam’s design, but the execution was all Jamie.

Jamie… Adam had been dreaming about that half-finished chapter. He had always intended to write a book, _someday_. But it was one of those things he could just never get around to; there were always so many other things to do! ‘Were’ being the operative word. One of the strange gifts this sort of injury imparted, along with great seats at concerts and simultaneous conspicuousness and invisibility, was the gift of time. Lots of it and not much to fill it with. So, Adam finally got around to that book he always intended to write. It was both easier and more difficult than he’d expected.

The thing was, it wasn’t even really a book about his injury. It was in there, of course. “When there’s an elephant in the room, you should introduce him.” Another man who faced his own mortality said that. If anything the book was about the things he’d learned since the accident, a lot of which was stuff he’d already known but hadn’t really had the impetus to refine into actual, cogent thoughts until suddenly all the movement and distractions ground to a halt.

The slightly confused nature of the theme of his book was not the problem, though; it would be cohesive once he added in the last bits he needed. Neither was the title, really. The title would come. No, the problem was, well, the same thing the problem usually was, frankly.

Jamie.

“You’re going to like what I’ve come up with for the new chair,” Jamie said as he came into the room. “I need you to test it out. This guy has a little more head control than you do, but if it works for you it should work for him.” He slid his arms under Adam’s shoulders and knees to move him.

“Jamie!” Adam protested. “Use the lift; remember your back!” Perhaps not surprisingly his complaints had even less effect than when he’d been able to physically protest.

“It’s fine,” Jamie said dismissively, rolling Adam up into his arms briefly and then down into his chair. “My back is fine and this way is much faster.”

Adam rolled his eyes, but tried a soothing tone, “Jamie, you don’t have to do everything yourself, you know.”

“But sometimes it is just the most efficient way,” Jamie countered, smoothly switching Adam from the wall-powered vent at his bed to the battery-powered one on his chair. “Now, what’s for breakfast?”

 

An hour later Adam was propped on a bean bag in Jamie’s workshop, watching Jamie working on a wheelchair prototype in between trying fruitlessly to think of titles. The air smelled of welding, grease, and metal. It made Adam feel at home. “Who is this one for again?” He asked.

“That veteran in North Carolina who I built a chair for about a year ago?” Jamie said, pushing up his helmet to inspect a weld. “He was a partial-quad and he’s regained some more function so I’m making a new version.”

Adam’s accident had prompted yet another career change for Jamie, now one of the world’s foremost makers of innovative wheelchairs and assistive apparatus. He’d made some patentable products, but his favorite projects by far were the custom chairs he made for quads around the country, and he would never take a dime for any of them.

“Okay, I think it’s ready to test again,” Jamie said, blowing on the hot weld. “You ready?”

 

_Untitled, Chapter 3_

_Some people are do-ers and some people are talkers. Jamie is obvious. Have you ever met him? I think if he could find a way to manage it he just wouldn’t talk at all. I have a little of both sides, but if it came down to choosing one I think I’m a talker._

_When I make things, as much as I’m enjoying the process of design and execution, I am always thinking about who I’d like to tell about this and how I’d describe it. I love to share my experiences; a lot of the joy I get out of doing things is related to talking about it. This is one of several reasons that I’m glad, if the accident had to happen to one of us, it happened to me. For me being paralyzed is a fairly major inconvenience. For Jamie, the consummate do-er, it might have been an end-game._

_Our relationship before the accident was almost entirely based on doing things together. We could work side by side on a project and might not speak more than a dozen words in two days, but I have rarely felt closer to anybody._

_After my accident Jamie and I lost the primary language we had communicated in. Robbed of that, he did two things. First, he threw himself into the renovations on our house. He worked side-by-side with the laborers and contractors to put in ramps and lifts and widen doorways so I could come home. Second, unable to find his own words, he found someone else’s._

_Jamie checked out stacks of books from the library and read them aloud to me. We’d easily manage five in a week. The steady drone of his voice and the content of the books provided both comfort and intellectual stimulation at a time when I desperately needed both._

_My own memories of this point in my recovery are pretty patchy. I remember the boredom of being stuck in bed all the time, the depression and the smell of antiseptic. I remember just enough of the long, exhausting hours of therapy to be glad I don’t remember more._

“Mustard or mayo?” Jamie asked from across the room. Adam quickly saved and exited so he didn’t type his lunch request into his manuscript.

“Mustard.” He adjusted the chair’s controls to bring him to a sitting position at his spot at the table. The kitchen was cool and dim and mid-afternoon light splashed through the sliding door and across the table. A small motor in pieces that Jamie had been tinkering with sat in a box to one side of the counter.

“I’m writing about being at the rehab hospital.” He listened to Jamie open and close the fridge door. R2 turned on his vacuum attachment to clean up microscopic bread crumbs and Jamie told him that if he had to clean the already clean floor he should do it after lunch. The robot gave one, flat, “boop” of assent (Adam could swear he sounded sulky) and whirred off into the living room, vacuum still going. Jamie appeared at his side carrying two sandwiches and raised an eyebrow as if to say, “and?”

“Do you have anything you want to add?” Adam asked. “What do you remember? What was it like for you?”

Jamie stalled by adding the automatic food advancement and napkin system (A-FANs) attachment, one of Adam’s first inventions for himself, to the chair and loading the sandwich in it. “It’s not really something that’s easy to put into words,” he said once he was seated across from Adam.

“Try. Please?” Adam asked.

"It was like,” he started and then stopped abruptly. Took a bite of sandwich and chewed. Adam waited. “Like how some things you can't see unless they're in motion. You know?" He looked for a sign of understanding from Adam, but Adam wasn’t getting it. "No? You know those battery operated whirligig fan things you get at the fair? When you turn them on they spin and light up and the lights make a pattern in a circle...” He paused again.

Adam could picture the fans Jamie was talking about. Had vivid memories as a child of being dared by his cousins to stick his tongue into one. But he couldn’t see how it related to his recovery. Jamie gazed out the window with the distant look he sometimes got when working on an especially vexing problem.

“It's like a zoetrope," Jamie snapped his fingers, finally landing on a metaphor he was happy with. ”You know, those old Victorian toys? I made one in school once. You can only see the thing when it's moving. When it's still, it's not the whole picture. It's not even really the same thing."  
Adam smiled sadly, not because he still didn’t understand, but because this time he did.

***

  
_(July 2011, California Pacific Regional Rehabilitation Center)_

Sometimes it’s frighteningly easy for Jamie to forget that this is Adam who he comes and sits by every day. The figure in the bed hardly resembles Adam. All his hair is shaved and all the tiny nicks and bruises and welding burns that covered Adam’s fingers and arms have healed and left perfect unblemished skin in their place. His muscle has begun to seriously waste away. Adam was never a very muscular guy, but he wasn’t scrawny, and as his muscle disappears it leaves him looking flattened. Empty. Like a sock puppet without a hand inside.

The most disturbing thing is the stillness. Adam was never, ever still, yet he lies in bed for hours every day not moving a muscle, not even twitching his eyes. If it weren’t for the steady, artificial rise and fall of his chest there are times Jamie wouldn’t know he was alive.

They know that Adam is awake a good deal more of the time than he admits to. The array of monitors connected to him make faking sleep rather difficult. He sticks with it though, refusing to open his eyes and answer the various therapist and nurses who come in and out. The simple tasks they request of him ( _wiggle your toes, squeeze my hand_ ) are now far beyond him and Adam’s defense to acknowledging his inabilities is simply to refuse to acknowledge anything.

The doctors tell Jamie that depression is normal after this kind of injury. The nurses tell him that, just like before Adam woke up from his coma, he ought to talk to him. Even when he wasn’t sure Adam was listening it would be good for him to hear a voice. Jamie doesn’t know what to say; and he feels terrible about it, but he likes it better on the days Adam pretends to be asleep.

Because this person isn’t his Adam; doesn’t even look like his Adam. His Adam was alive with energy, moving and twitching in every cell right out to his fingers that would never stop drumming and fiddling with things and driving Jamie insane. Jamie is just waiting for his Adam to come back.

He’s driving home from the hospital one day, carefully trying not to think about anything, when he notices the sign for the library and pulls an illegal U-turn right in the middle of the street.

  
***

 

_Untitled, Chapter 2_

_I have some, cognitive dissonance, sort of, surrounding diagnoses like mine and how they are given. How they are treated. These kind of diagnoses necessarily focus on the things you **can’t** do, because, basically, that’s the best way to describe them. And that’s what people notice, that’s what they think about. I don’t particularly have a problem with that. I think it’s a simple and effective way to discuss the reality of a condition._

_But then, you hear a lot of people say things about how you should focus on what you **can** do instead of what you **can’t**. And I get that, too. Because obviously I’ve done way more things from this chair than anyone, including myself, would have thought possible. But I can’t just say “focus on what you can do” because that isn’t how I got here. If I just focused on what I could do, then I’d never have innovated and invented half the stuff that allows me to do the things I do. Do you see the contradiction I’m getting at here?_

_I’ve always been attracted, even way before my injury, to the things that I can’t do. Because that’s where the fun problems and solutions are at. It’s by rooting around the edges of “can’t” that you start to find interesting ways to grow the list of “can”s._

_I think that is something that is missed in the delivery and reception of my type of diagnosis (and believe me, I realize, that for about the first year, at least, you’re in no place to hear about the silver linings or any of this). Given some time to adjust, life in a chair isn’t that much different than life before._

_At first I was really bored. The list of things I could do from my chair was short and I didn’t want to do any of them. I thought that was going to be my reality. But in time, I have found a multitude of ways to entertain myself. I’m at least as busy now as I was before, and doing many of the same things. I blog, I film my web show, I do a little contract work designing things in CAD, and I market Jamie’s wheelchair inventions to buyers. I have a store on ShapeWays.com where I sell my art._

_This was a life altering injury. Not a life ending one._

_I asked Jamie what he remembered about receiving my diagnosis. He said, “It was like when you line up two mirrors just right and they make a tunnel that seems to go on forever.” I’m not sure what to make of that, other than obviously his experience was different than mine._

  
***

  
_(February, 2011, San Francisco General Hospital)_

Most of the time Jamie is able to hold it together. He absorbs all the information and the visitors (and their tears) without it getting to him. On the day Adam’s primary doctor finally broke down and explained Adam’s “best case scenario” to him Jamie thanked him for his honesty and kept it together until the man left.

As soon as he was alone he rushed to the bathroom and was violently sick. He sat on the cold tile floor and cried like he hadn’t since he was a lonely farm boy in Indiana.

Jamie’s sitting on the floor trying to pull himself back together when he catches his reflection in the mirror on the back of the door. He remembers a farm boy with freckles and cut-off shorts, sitting on the peeling linoleum tiles of the upstairs bathroom with his knees brushing the closed door. Angling a hand mirror in front of the door mirror to watch the tunnels appear and disappear.

Jamie imagined that each mirror in the tunnel was a parallel universe, where another Jamie sat in front of a mirror. And just at this moment they had all discovered this portal, but from here their lives would continue and diverge in an infinite number of ways. Jamie imagined if he wished hard enough he could swap places with one of the other Jamie-iterations and live a different life, away from the mumbling of the farm animals and the dusty fields and his father, who stayed in bed more often than not, but yelled when he was up.

He didn’t figure out for a long time that you can change places with the ‘you’ in a parallel universe. You just have to make his choice.

  
***

  
Adam finally passed out asleep after 8 straight hours on his computer making “the final touches, I swear!” on his latest sculpture in CAD.

Jamie drove his chair into their bedroom and scooped Adam up and into bed, simply because he could. Because Adam’s frame was so much smaller than it used to be. He’d lost all of the soft pudge that he used to carry and as a result his features appeared much sharper and thinner.  Jamie removed his glasses carefully and switched him to the wall mounted vent.

Adam knew that he needed a nap every day in order to stay healthy, but as ever, there were times when he just needed a cookie and couldn’t be rationalized with.

Jamie closed the blinds, went through his ritual of checking the vent settings and plugging in the chair and battery powered vent to charge, then headed back down to the basement to work. There was an electrical hum as Jamie came into his work shop. The 3D printer worked quietly in its corner, laying down layer after layer of fine silvery stainless steel dust. Adam must have sent his sculpture to the printer before he crashed.

Jamie watched the machine work for a few minutes. It was still entrancing to watch something solid being made from dust, no matter how many times he saw it. After a while his mind wandered to the latest problem he needed to solve on a prototype and he turned to his work bench; the printer would run for a few hours at least.

Later, much later if the dim light coming through the high window was any indication, the printer chimed its “finished” noise. Adam still hadn’t woken up, which wasn’t exactly surprising. The elaborate and extensive monitoring systems and alarms they had fitted the house with gave Jamie peace of mind that he was still resting safely.

Jamie extracted the mostly cleaned piece from the printer and dragged it over to a hood where he could air blast the rest of the loose grit off and get a look at it. The sculpture was full of the soft, twisting forms Adam had favored ever since his fascination with fractal somewhat passed. The forms soared and dove over each other in a complicated pattern of swirls.

Frankly, to Jamie it looked a lot like the last half dozen sculptures Adam had made, but if he looked carefully he could see that the lines were different. Anyway, it wasn’t like he had to worry about the cluttering up the house, they mostly sold quickly to people who had much more appreciation for all their nuances than Jamie did.

The piece was still soft and would have to go into the furnace with bronze before it was done. They kept the furnace in the back yard shed in deference to the fire marshal; that process would have to wait until tomorrow. Jamie carefully slid the piece onto a rolling platform and took it up to the main floor in the lift so that Adam could see it that evening.

The sun was just starting to dip below that trees and sunset light was streaking across their living room as Jamie rolled the piece in. He positioned it in front of the windows and stood back to see how the light made shadows through all the crevices. Even unfinished and mostly dull the stainless steel glinted. Jamie turned the piece a bit and light scattered across the floor diamond dust. The curves looked alive in this light. Adam called this line of sculptures “Life.” Privately, Jamie called it “a beautiful mess.”

  
***

  
“Hello! Hola!” Consuela called from the patio door in her rich accent. She leaned against the glass to look through and Adam could see her teeth from her smile.

“Hola, como està?” he answered, rolling his chair over the pressure switch to unlock the door.

“Bien, mi’ijo, bien!” She patted his cheek and fussed over his hair. “Tu vas a necesitar un corte de pelo muy prono. Y donde es su marido obstinado?” While she talked she stashed her sunglasses somewhere in her oversized purse and hung it on a peg by the door. She carried the kind of giant, structure-less bag that Adam always associated with grandmothers and hidden treats.

“I got about half of that,” Adam laughed. “I need more practice.”

“Poco a poco,” she assured him. “All things come in time.”

“Tengo una nueva escultura,” Adam said carefully and turned to head into the living room. Consuela followed him and when she saw the sculpture, finished, polished, and glinting in the afternoon light she gasped and clasped her hands together.

“Oh! It’s beautiful! This is my favorite one yet,” she exclaimed, defaulting into English for Adam’s benefit.

“You say that about all of them!” Adam laughed.

“And they are all my favorites! Each one is better than the last,” she insisted. Adam might have shook his head and he turned and headed for the bathroom, but he was smiling.

Consuela came over every other day to help Adam get a bath and shave. (She also occasionally brought fantastic Mexican food and frequently showed off pictures of the cutest brown-eyed, curly-haired grand babies.) It had taken a few years for Adam to convince Jamie he didn’t have to do it all himself, but since he finally did, even Jamie would admit having Consuela’s help made everything better.

They were just finishing Adam’s shave when Jamie came in, wiping his greasy hands on a blue shop towel. “Hola Jamie!” Consuela said his name with an “h” sound at the front, like HI-mey. She named one of her sons _Jaime_ , she liked to remind them.

Jamie responded in rapid Spanish and kissed her on both cheeks, holding his dirty hands away. He was still pretty fluent in the Spanish he’d learned in the Caribbean and on construction sites decades ago. It was obnoxious, but also very Jamie.

  
***

  
_Untitled, Chapter 8:_

_Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses. Or, more accurately, not all robots and memoirs. I have a lot of pain (which is counterintuitive for someone who can’t feel like 90% of his body). I rely on others to complete even the most simple of physical tasks. I rely on a machine to continue to breathe._

_Despite all that I can do with the aid of assistive tech and computers, there are things I miss. I miss the feeling of actually holding and manipulating materials to create things. Cutting wood, bending metal, feeling the physical reshaping and rebirth happening. I long to be able to reach out and touch Jamie, or my sons. Sometimes I wake up from a dream with the memory so clear of how Jamie’s stubble felt rasping under my fingertips, and then before I can grasp it it’s gone._

_Of course, another gift this kind of accident gives you is perspective. I have so much; how can I complain?_

  
***

Bedtime is Jamie’s favorite part of the day. (It’s because that’s the time when he has the most to do, physical tasks to take care of Adam, but Jamie doesn’t realize that.) He just knows that this part of his routine always leaves him feeling particularly settled inside, like all is right in his world.

Bed time meds takes about ten minutes and then there are Jamie’s ritual checks of the vent setting and the emergency batteries.

With the trach Adam can’t wear t-shirts because the collars are too high. Instead he wears button downs and sometimes at night he wears one of Jamie’s old worn and stained white shirts. Probably the ones Jamie wore back on the show, before the accident.

Jamie has always felt that his fingers are too big for the really meticulous model work Adam excelled at, but this they know how to do. He slides the shirt up Adam’s shoulders and leans him back into bed, doing up the buttons quickly. The familiar fabric closes over Adam’s chest: warm, breathing, and alive.

He returns the discarded shirt to the closet for tomorrow, placing it on the hanger and doing the buttons up with the top two undone, hanging it up carefully oriented to the left.

“Aren’t you coming?” Adam calls impatiently from the next room. Jamie looks over at their clothes hanging neatly in the closet, his white shirts on the left and Adam’s black ones on the right. It makes him smile and just below the level of consciousness he’s thinking about yin and yang and light and dark and curiosity and caution. “Be right there,” he says and “Jeeves, get the lights.”

  
***

  
“A Beautiful Mess, By Adam Savage,” his agent says, holding up one of the very first proof prints of his book so that he can get a good look. “I like the title, it works. How did you come up with it?”

“It was Jamie, actually,” Adam says, wishing right now that he still had use of his fingers so that he could pick up one of the books, feel its weight, fan the pages and smell the ink. It might be a little weird to ask his agent to let him smell the book. Anyway, he could ask Jamie later.

“Really?” his agent asked, bringing him back from staring at the book, which had a CAD rendering of one of his sculptures on the front.

“Yeah,” Adam said. “He was right in the middle of cleaning out the 3D printer and bitching about how the metal dust gets just everywhere and he said it, and I just knew that was it.”

“Huh,” she said, packing the copies into a box to leave with him. “Don’t you wonder what goes on inside his head all the time?” She said rhetorically and Adam just nodded and smiled.

Because the answer was somewhat yes and somewhat no. More and more Adam was beginning to realize that Jamie didn’t even know what he was thinking half the time. But that when he said something about shirts, you could be sure that it wasn’t about the shirts, and when he read a book, it wasn’t really about the book, and when he said “a beautiful mess,” Adam was pretty sure it meant “I love you.” And that was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a link to the sculpture I was imagining Adam making (http://www.superbwallpapers.com/3d/sculpture-5815/), and some other he might have made (http://bib993.deviantart.com/art/3D-printed-fractal-sculptures-showcased-456945690).


End file.
